One in every eleven persons born in Mexico has gone to the U.S. The National Review reported that in 2014 $1.87 billion was spent on incarcerating illegal immigrant criminals….Now add hundreds of billions for welfare and remittances! MICHAEL BARGO, Jr…… for the AMERICAN THINKER.COM

Violence in the Halls, Disorder in the Malls

Judging by video evidence, the participants in the violent mall brawls over the Christmas weekend were overwhelmingly black teens, though white teens were also involved. The media have assiduously ignored this fact, of course, as they have for previous violent flash mob episodes. That disproportion has significance for the next administration’s school-discipline policies, however. If Donald Trump wants to make schools safe again, he must rescind the Obama administration’s diktats regarding classroom discipline, which are based on a fantasy version of reality that is having serious real-world consequences.

The Obama Justice and Education Departments have strong-armed schools across the country to all but eliminate the suspension and expulsion of insubordinate students. The reason? Because black students are disciplined at higher rates than whites. According to Washington bureaucrats, such disproportionate suspensions can mean only one thing: teachers and administrators are racist. The Obama administration rejects the proposition that black students are more likely to assault teachers or fight with other students in class. The so-called “school to prison” pipeline is a function of bias, not of behavior, they say.

This week’s mall violence, which injured several police and security officers, is just the latest piece of evidence for how counterfactual that credo is. A routine complaint in police-community meetings in minority areas is that large groups of teens are fighting on corners. Residents of the South Bronx’s 41st Precinct complained repeatedly to the precinct commander in a June 2015 meeting about such street disorder. “There’s too much fighting,” one woman said. “There was more than 100 kids the other day; they beat on a girl about 14 years old.” In April 2016, a 17-year-old girl in Coney Island, Brooklyn, Ta’Jae Warner, tried to protect her brother from a group of girls gathered outside her apartment building who were threatening to kill him; one of the group knocked her unconscious. She died four days later. At a meeting in the 23rd Precinct in East Harlem in 2015, residents asked why the police hadn’t stopped a recent stampede of youth down Third Avenue. In April 2012, a group of teens stomped a gang rival to death in a Bronx housing project.

The idea that such street behavior does not have a classroom counterpart is ludicrous. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic males of the same age. The lack of socialization that produces such a vast disparity in murder rates, as well as less lethal street violence, inevitably will show up in classroom behavior. Teens who react to a perceived insult on social media by trying to shoot the offender are not likely to restrain themselves in the classroom if they feel “disrespected” by a teacher or fellow students. Interviews with teachers confirm the proposition that children from communities with high rates of family breakdown bring vast amounts of disruptive anger to school, especially girls. It is no surprise that several of the Christmas riots began with fights between girls. School officials in urban areas across the country set up security corridors manned by police officers at school dismissal times to avoid gang shootings. And yet, the Obama administration would have us believe that in the classroom, black students are no more likely to disrupt order than white students. Equally preposterous is the claim that teachers and administrators are bigots. There is no more liberal a profession than teaching; education schools are one long indoctrination in white-privilege theory. And yet when these social-justice warriors get in the classroom, according to the Obama civil rights lawyers, they start wielding invidious double standards in discipline.

The best solution to such alleged teacher racism, according to the Obama Justice and Education Departments, is to pressure teachers to keep unruly students in the classroom rather than removing them. This movement goes by the name of “restorative justice;” its result has been anarchy, adding a school-to-hospital pipeline to the school-to-prison pipeline. The St. Paul school district has been in the restorative-justice vanguard. Assaults on teachers tripled in 2015, reports Katherine Kersten of the Center for the American Experiment; one teacher sustained a traumatic brain injury, while another required staples in her head. Melees of 40 to 50 people (resembling the mall violence) are common, according to Kersten; roving packs of students attack isolated individuals. One high school issued emergency whistles to teachers. (Kersten has a full-length feature story on the St. Paul schools in City Journal’s upcoming issue.)

Over the last year, a Seattle school district in the throes of “restorative justice” experienced an alleged gang rape and several student deaths. Criminal charges, including murder, were filed against a group of students not yet out of middle school, reports the Seattle Times. Teachers’ unions in Fresno, Des Moines, New York City, and Indianapolis have all lodged complaints about the anti-discipline philosophy, according to Education Week. The Fresno teachers signed a petition pointing out that students are returned to class after cursing at teachers and physically assaulting them, without suffering any consequences. Fresno’s teachers have been injured trying to stop fights; some are retiring because teaching where severely disruptive students cannot be dislodged has become impossible. In Des Moines, students now hit and scream at each other and their teachers, reports the Des Moines Register.

Undeterred by such news, the Obama administration has rolled out reams of material for combatting supposed teacher racism. Since 2014 alone, it has produced a School Climate and Discipline Guidance Package, a Rethink Discipline Public Awareness Campaign, a Resource Guide for Superintendent Action, a National Resource Center for School Justice Partnerships, a template for “School Climate Surveys,” and a “Quick Guide on Making School Climate Improvements.” The DOJ is “investing” $1 million (read: showering money on left-wing consultants) for the Pyramid Equity Project, which is supposed to establish national models for addressing issues of implicit bias in early learning programs.

Naturally, federal litigation has followed. Just this month, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division imposed a consent decree on the Watson Chapel, Arkansas, School District, after suing it for racially discriminatory school-discipline practices. Those practices “prevent students of color from reaching their full potential,” according to Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta. A federal court will continue to have jurisdiction over the school until the DOJ declares it in absolute compliance with the decree, a process anticipated to take three years.

Given this threat of lawsuits, it’s no wonder that district superintendents dismiss the rising violence and announce that restorative justice is “working.” It’s certainly “worked” to reduce expulsions and suspensions—in Seattle, by a whopping 77 percent from 2013 to 2016. Never mind that students aren’t learning and teachers are at risk.

The Trump administration must tear up every guidance and mandate in the Justice and Education Departments that penalize school districts for disproportionate rates of school discipline. Absent clear proof of teacher or administrator racism, Washington should let schools correct student behavioral problems as they see fit. Students in classrooms where disruption is common are far less likely to learn; that is the civil rights problem that should get activists’ attention. Taxpayer dollars should not be funding specious federal crusades against phantom discrimination; school districts might have more resources if their local taxpayers were not also being hit by federal levies, which are redistributed around the country in the delusional pursuit of “social justice.” Until the two-parent family is reconstructed, classrooms remain the only hope for socializing children and for preventing the teen violence that broke out across the country this Christmas. Schools can only accomplish that civilizing mission, however, if they are allowed to insist on strict rules, respect for authority, and consequences for misconduct.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The War on Cops.

An army of law enforcement officers led by
Torrance police arrested 13 reputed South Los Angeles gang members Friday in a
massive pre-dawn operation to break up an organized ring believed responsible
for some 5,000 residential burglaries in five Southern California counties.

Of the 702 people shot to death by police this year, according
to a database maintained by the Washington Post, 163 were
black men, about 23 percent of the total. Whites made up roughly half
the victims, while Hispanics, Native Americans, Asians, black women
and people of mixed race made up the balance.

AMERICA’S
YOUTH STARVE

FOR EIGHT
YEARS BARACK OBAMA AND HIS HAREM OF CORRUPT DEM POLS HAVE SABOTAGED OUR BORDERS TO EASE TENS OF MILLIONS
OF ILLEGALS INTO OUR JOBS, WELFARE OFFICES AND VOTING BOOTHS.

The
new reports show that in addition to “traditional” coping strategies of
skipping meals and eating cheap food, these teens and pre-teens are increasingly
forced into shoplifting, stealing, selling drugs, joining a gang, or selling their bodies for money
in a struggle to eat properly.

AMERICA’S YOUTH STARVE…… ILLEGALS SUCK IN BILLIONS IN
WELFARE… they also get our jobs!

The new reports show that in addition to
“traditional” coping strategies of skipping meals and eating cheap food, these
teens and pre-teens are increasingly forced into shoplifting, stealing, selling
drugs, joining a gang, or selling their bodies for money in a struggle to eat
properly.

“The report noted that many illegals don't have jobs or have
difficulty in landing good jobs because of local laws.”

“However, it identified several states that have begun easing
employment laws so that illegals can get a job.”

TRUMPERNOMICS:

"The collection of
billionaires, bankers, CEOs, generals and social arch-reactionaries that
will comprise his cabinet and White House inner circle is pledged to
remove all constraints on the ability of the rich to plunder American
society for their own personal gain and profit."

OBAMA-CLINTON-TRUMPERnomics WORKS! But only for the SUPER RICH!A recently completed study by economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman found that the share of national income received by the bottom half of the US population has been reduced from 20 percent in 1980 to 12 percent, while the income of the top 1 percent has risen from 12 percent to 20 percent. In other words, some 8 percent of national income has been transferred from the bottom half of the population to the top 1 percent.

UNDER BARACK OBAMA'S OPEN BORDERS AND TWO LA RAZA SUPREMACIST SECRETARY OF LABORS, 75% OF ALL JOBS WENT TO FOREIGN BORN, BOTH LEGAL AND ILLEGALSConducted by Harvard economist Lawrence Katz and Princeton economist Alan Krueger, it found that 94 percent of the 10 million jobs created during the Obama administration were temporary, contract or part-time positions. The proportion of workers engaged in such jobs increased from 10.7 percent of the population to 15.8 percent. At the same time, the study found that under Obama, there were 1 million fewer workers engaged in full-time jobs than there were at the start of the recession.

THE TWISTED ROAD TO REVOLUTION CAME DOWN WALL STREET

FIRST

OBAMA –CLINTONOMICS FOR THE SUPER RICH

"Between 2002 and 2015 annual earnings for the bottom 90 percentof Americans rose by only 4.5 percent, while earnings for the top 1 percent grew by 22.7 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Under the Obama administration, more than 90 percent of

income gains since the so-called “recovery” began have gone to the top one percent."

“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. Thisis the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan THEAMERICAN THINKER.com

AMERICAN HAS FOUND MILLIONS OF JOBS FOR ILLEGALS AND BILLIONS FOR WELFARE.... BUT FOR AMERICANS... Nada!

“Behind this year’s surge is a toxic mix of cuts to social services, unemployment, hopelessness…”

The scenes of chaos and panic that played out at more than 15 shopping malls across the United States on Monday convey the tense and explosive character of social life in America at the end of 2016.

What began as one of the busiest shopping days of the year ended with large-scale evacuations, dozens of arrests, numerous injuries and entire malls on police lockdown.

Heavily armed police cleared crowds of youth at a number of shopping malls, primarily those located in working-class neighborhoods. Bystander video shows hysterical shoppers running away as police armed with assault rifles and military helmets move in to subdue large groups of youth.

Though there is no indication that the gatherings of young people were coordinated, a remarkable pattern emerges from what can be pieced together about the separate events.

In the early evening, as the malls reached peak activity, hundreds of young people began to converge in what the youth billed as “fights” in social media posts. Small scuffles broke out between individual young people, most of whom were on winter break from high school, and the crowds grew larger.

Word passed and a mood of panic set in. Rumors of shooting incidents spread rapidly. Jittery onlookers interpreted loud noises as gunshots. There were many reports of people shouting, “Gun!” People were injured as thousands sought to flee the crowded malls for the perceived safety of their cars.

At a mall in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a local news program reported “chaotic panic and everybody running all at once” after the sound of a chair slamming into the floor was mistaken for gunfire. An eight-year-old and a 12-year-old were injured in the evacuation as police surrounded and entered the mall.

In Garden City, New York, where seven people were injured, eyewitnesses described a “stampede” after dozens of people called police, erroneously believing a shooting was taking place. In Newport News, Virginia, a local news organization reported that people “were running out of the mall screaming; some people feared for their lives after they heard rumors that someone was running around the mall with a gun.”

Police cleared two malls in Memphis, Tennessee and arrested seven youth after fights and false reports of shootings. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, youth set off firecrackers and “kicked off a wave of panic,” according to a CNN report. In Brentwood, Ohio, outside Cleveland, police placed a mall on lockdown and arrested a young person “for attempting to strike an officer that was dealing with another disorderly patron.” Police used pepper spray to disperse the crowd.

Five young men between the ages of 14 and 16 from Hartford, Connecticut, a largely impoverished city, were arrested at a mall in nearby Manchester, where officers called in backup from neighboring jurisdictions and descended on the facility to break up gatherings of hundreds of youth. Similar events took place in Farmington, Connecticut; Aurora, Illinois; Fort Worth, Texas; Syracuse, New York; Monroeville, Pennsylvania; Tempe, Arizona; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Aurora, Colorado, where police reported that over 500 youth “surrounded an off-duty officer” who was attempting to detain another youth.

Meanwhile, the city of Chicago was hit by the most deadly wave of shooting violence in twenty years, with 53 wounded and 11 killed on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. As DNAInfo reported, “Behind this year’s surge is a toxic mix of cuts to social services, unemployment, hopelessness…”

Just hours before the mall disorders took place, and after the devastating weekend in Chicago, Obama was interviewed on CNN by David Axelrod, his former campaign manager. Amidst much laughter and mutual flattery, Obama touted his presidential tenure and presented himself as a fighter for social justice. “I would argue that during the entire eight years that I’ve been president, that spirit of America has still been there in all sorts of ways,” he declared.

In his end-of-the-year press conference on December 16, Obama spoke of “how far we’ve come over the past eight years,” before adding that “by so many measures, our country is stronger and more prosperous than it was when we started. That’s a situation that I’m proud to leave for my successor.”

The mall eruptions expose as a lie the saccharine picture of America painted by the corporate press and Obama as his administration draws to a close. That mini-riots took place in fifteen different locations located hundreds of miles from one another shows that something is profoundly wrong with America.

Monday’s free-for-all in Aurora, Colorado took place at the same mall where James Holmes killed 12 people and injured 70 others in July 2012. Since Obama took office, 122 people have been killed in school shootings alone. The response of the government has been two-fold: empty banalities and the militarization of the police.

Though concerns for their immediate safety may have provoked shoppers to take flight, the underlying anxieties are rooted in social relations that are dominated by the vast levels of economic inequality that loom over every aspect of life in the United States.

The outbursts of violence and fear took place against the backdrop of a holiday season ritualized by the media to conceal the brutal fact that all human relations are mediated through the buying and selling of commodities. While this process reaches a fever pitch at Christmas—the make-or-break period for retail profits—the commodification of human relations, with the general tension and frustration it produces, is essential to all social relations under capitalism.

The United States is a country dominated by a

financial oligarchy, both economically and

politically. The vast majority of the people

have no outlet for expressing their own social

interests. All of the official institutions,

including the corporate-controlled media, the

two big-business parties and the trade

unions, are dedicated to stifling social

opposition and generating higher corporate

profits.

Half of all high school students—those fifteen years of age and younger—have never lived a day when the United States was not at war. Completely abandoned by the political establishment and hostile to the wars, poverty, state surveillance and police violence that have dominated their entire conscious lives, those youth who were old enough to vote in the Democratic primary contests voted for the self-proclaimed “socialist” Bernie Sanders by a nine-to-one margin over Hillary Clinton.

In his interview with Axelrod, Obama did not even address the character of the incoming Trump administration, which is promising to be the most reactionary in US history. In three weeks, Trump and his cabal of billionaires, evangelicals, generals, fascists and close relatives will control the executive branch. The incoming administration has promised a nuclear arms race, an assault on Social Security, Medicare and public education, and the deportation of millions of immigrant workers and their families.

This holiday season, the vast majority of workers share neither the complacent and cynical optimism of Obama, nor the blind bullishness of the stock market. What took place in America’s malls on Monday provides an inkling of the profound social shocks on the horizon for 2017.

The mood that predominates in America as the year concludes is one of nervousness and frustration combined with an emerging combativeness that has yet to find a progressive political expression. What is needed is a movement of the working class to direct the coming social explosion in a revolutionary and socialist direction.

UNDER THE LA RAZA SUPREMACIST OBAMA, THE MEX DRUG CARTELS NOW OPERATE BORDER TO UNDEFENDED BORDER

“Mexican drug cartels are the “other” terrorist threat to America. Militant Islamists have the goal of destroying the United States.Mexican drug cartels are now accomplishing that mission – from within, every day, in virtually every community across this country.”

AMERICA: NO LEGAL NEED APPLY

REPORT: The assault to finish off the American middle-class is NOT over

“The report noted that many illegals don't have jobs or have difficulty in landing good jobs because of local laws.”

“However, it identified several states that have begun easing employment laws so that illegals can get a job.”

TRUMPERNOMICS:

"The collection of billionaires, bankers, CEOs, generals and social arch-reactionaries that will comprise his cabinet and White House inner circle is pledged to remove all constraints on the ability of the rich to plunder American society for their own personal gain and profit."

“Mexican drug cartels are the “other” terrorist threat to America. Militant Islamists have the goal of destroying the United States.Mexican drug cartels are now accomplishing that mission – from within, every day, in virtually every community across this country.”

The chief motivating factor behind the rise on Wall Street is the understanding that the incoming Trump administration will not only carry out policies to benefit the financial elites, but that responsibility for implementing this agenda will be in the hands of some its foremost representatives.

The emphasis on class warfare, open borders, secularism, and multiculturalism at the expense of Americanism by not only the Democratic Party, but by their cohorts in the media and universities has led to a very divided America with each having a separate vision for the United States. The Left as represented by theDemocratic Party seeks an open-border stateless America where anyone who sets foot on our soil is free to practice their branch of identity within our borders and with no allegiance to American sovereignty.

Puzder’s nomination is of a piece with Trump’s other cabinet choices. Betsy DeVos, an enemy of public education, has been selected to head the Department of Education. Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon known for his antipathy towards government “interference” in housing regulation, has been nominated as the Housing and Urban Development Secretary.

ANDREW PUZDER:

ENEMY OF THE AMERICAN WORKER and ADVOCATE FOR OPEN BORDERS

TRUMP'S OPEN BORDERS AND AMNESTY/ NON-ENFORCEMENT POLICIES WILL HELP KEEP THE HAMBURGER INDUSTRY WELL STOCKED WITH "CHEAP" LABOR ILLEGALS.... The America people will then be forced to pay the REAL cost of all that staggeringly expensive labor

“Yet Andrew Puzder, the chief executive of the company that operates Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, has been chosen by President-elect Donald Trump as labor secretary.”

“Mr. Puzder, however, has been adamantly opposed to a meaningful increase in the federal minimum wage, which is $7.25 an hour. Mr. Trump has said he could stomach an increase to $10, which is still abysmal.”

“Here is the record at those restaurants. When the Obama Labor Department looked at thousands of complaints involving fast-food workers, it found labor law violations in 60 percent of the investigations at Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, usually for failure to pay the minimum wage or time and a half for overtime.”

The FDIC paid OneWest $1 billion, which Stein said went to “billionaire investors … to cover the close of foreclosing on working class, everyday American folks.”

“But the bank came under fire for its foreclosure practices as housing advocacy groups accused it of being too quick to foreclose on struggling homeowners. In 2011, dozens of demonstrators descended on Mnuchin's $26.5 million home in he wealthy Bel Air neighborhood to protest OneWest's eviction tactics, according to the Los Angeles Times.”

TRUMPERnomics:

AFTER OBAMA-CLINTONIMCS, THE LOOTING OF AMERICA BY THE RICH TO CONTINUE UNDER THEIR OWN, DONALD TRUMP

"Far from Trump’s demagogic claims that he would 'drain the swamp,' the corrupt nexus between Wall Street and Washington is tighter than ever."OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS is now the new TRUMPERnomics!

TRUMP VOWS TO SERVE THE RICH WITH SUPER OBAMA-CLINTONIMCS!

There is a vast chasm between this empty populist rhetoric and the personnel that Trump has selected to populate his government. The speech followed a series of cabinet picks, including billionaire asset strippers, Wall Street bankers, and dedicated opponents of financial and corporate regulations, public education and Medicare and Medicaid, to lead the Treasury, Commerce, Education and Health and Human Services departments.

"Trump is not the initiator of this class war against working people. It has been underway for decades, beginning in earnest with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and continuing under every succeeding administration, including the eight-year tenures of Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The colossal redistribution of wealth and income from the bottom to the top of American society reached record proportions under Obama, whose legacy of falling living standards and worsening economic crisis for tens of millions of workers was a decisive factor in the victory of the fascistic demagogue and con artist Trump."

Transcripts released by WikiLeaks of Clinton speeches to Wall Street bankers, for which she received six-figure paychecks, show her praising the recommendations of the 2010 Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission, which called for sweeping cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; the elimination of 200,000 federal jobs; a tax on employees’

Wikileaks exposed!

BARACK OBAMA AND THE GOLDEN AGE OF CRONY BANKSTER LOOTING…. And not one went to prison!

“Citigroup’s recommendations came just three days after then-President George W. Bush signed into law the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which allocated $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue the largest Wall Street banks. The single biggest beneficiary was Citigroup, which was given $45 billion in cash in the form of a government stock purchase, plus a $306 billion government guarantee to back up its worthless mortgage-related assets.”

“As president, Obama not only funneled trillions of dollars to the banks, he saw to it that not a single leading Wall Street executive faced prosecution for the orgy of speculation and swindling that led to the financial collapse and Great Recession, and he personally intervened to block legislation capping executive pay at bailed-out firms.”

“So when Clinton was hobnobbing with Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein in 2013, while investigations of wrongdoing by Goldman and the other Wall Street banks were still ongoing, she was consorting with a man who belonged in prison.”

THE CONSPIRACY:

The Democrat Party and the Mexican Fascist Party of LA RAZA…. Partnered to finish off white American middle class.

HOW MEXICO KILLED AMERICA FROM BORDER to OPEN BORDER…. By invitation of the Democrat Party

WARNING!

VERY GRAPHIC IMAGES OF AMERICA UNDER LA RAZA MEX OCCUPATION:

THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S SURRENDER OF OUR BORDERS TO LA RAZA, AND THE MEX DRUG CARTELS.

Even though it has gone virtually unreported by corporate media, BreitbartNews has extensively documented the Clintons’ longstanding support for “open borders.” Interestingly, as the LosAngelesTimes observed in 2007, the Clinton’s praise for globalization and open borders frequently comes when they are speaking before a wealthy foreign audiences and donors.

OPEN BORDERS:

HOW THE BANKSTER-FUNDED DEMOCRAT PARTY NEARLY DESTROYED THE GOP, THE AMERICAN WORKER and then AMERICA!

MEXICANS JUMP AMERICA’S OPEN & UNDEFENDED BORDERS AMNESTY

"Even though it has gone virtually unreported by corporate media, BreitbartNews has extensively documented the Clintons’ longstanding support for “open borders.” Interestingly, as the LosAngelesTimes observed in 2007, the Clinton’s praise forglobalization and open bordersfrequently comes when they are speaking before a wealthy foreign audiences and donors."

"But the Clintons personify this corruption just as much as Trump, even if they made use of a different mechanism and on a somewhat smaller scale. They amassed a fortune exceeding $150 million in the decade after Bill Clinton left the White House, mainly through six-figure fees for addressing corporate and Wall Street audiences. Barack Obama will shortly take a similar path, reaping his reward from the financial aristocracy whose interests he safeguarded so assiduously over the past eight years."

The world’s wealthiest 200 billionaires increased their net worth by $237 billion in 2016, taking their total wealth to $4.4 trillion as of the close of trading on Tuesday, an overall increase for the year of 5.7 percent, according to calculations by Bloomberg.

The major factor in the wealth increase is the surge in the US stock market since the election of Donald Trump on November 8, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average heading towards 20,000, an increase of close to 9 percent in seven weeks, or 69 percent on an annualized basis.

At the top of the rich list is Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, whose net worth is $85.9 billion. As the Bloomberg report noted, without taking into account any interest payments or other wealth-enlarging factors, he would have to spend $2.3 million every day for the next 100 years to run down this vast fortune.

The biggest gainer for the year was Warren Buffett, whose investment firm Berkshire Hathaway saw its net worth increase by $11.8 billion, largely on the back of holdings in airlines and banks, whose stock values have soared since the election of Trump. His total wealth has risen to $74.1 billion, an increase of 19 percent for the year.

US billionaires have increased their wealth by $77 billion since the Trump victory based on expectations that his commitment to end corporate regulations and carry out both corporate and personal income tax cuts will boost profits.

That perception has been reinforced by Trump’s appointees to key cabinet posts, including billionaire Wilbur Ross to head the Commerce Department and former Goldman Sachs executive Steven Mnuchin as Treasury secretary.

Summing up the post-election euphoria in ultra-wealthy circles, hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio, who ranks 63rd on the top 200 list, said last week that Trump had lifted the “animal spirits” of capitalism and the market could rise even further. Simon Smiles, the investment manager for ultra-high-net-worth clients at UBS Wealth Management, said, “2016 ended up being a spectacular year for risk assets.”

Another major beneficiary was oil industry mogul Harold Hamm. His wealth more than doubled, rising by $8.4 billion to reach $15.3 billion, on the expectation that a Trump administration will slash regulations on the extraction of fossil fuels. Overall, the 49 energy, mining and metal billionaires saw the biggest increase in wealth of any category, recording an increase of $80 billion after a decline of $32 billion in 2015.

Other major beneficiaries were Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook. Bezos, who doubled his wealth in 2015 to $60 billion, increased it by a further $7.5 billion this year, while Zuckerberg added $5.4 billion.

The accumulation of wealth at the heights of society is mirrored in income statistics. A recently completed

study by economists Thomas Piketty,

Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman found

that the share of national income received by

the bottom half of the US population has been

reduced from 20 percent in 1980 to 12

percent, while the income of the top 1 percent

has risen from 12 percent to 20 percent. In

other words, some 8 percent of national

income has been transferred from the bottom

half of the population to the top 1 percent.

This trend has been accelerating not least because of the spread of part-time and contract working under the Obama administration, as revealed in a major study released this month. Conducted by Harvard economist

Lawrence Katz and Princeton economist Alan

Krueger, it found that 94 percent of the 10

million jobs created during the Obama

administration were temporary, contract or

part-time positions. The proportion of

workers engaged in such jobs increased from

10.7 percent of the population to 15.8

percent. At the same time, the study found

that under Obama, there were 1 million fewer

workers engaged in full-time jobs than there

were at the start of the recession.

The growth of this type of contingent work provides a significant boost to profits. Employers of part-time labour are not required to provide benefits for employees. Young workers have been the hardest hit by the growth of contract labour and were the largest proportion of such employees. The study found that they generally do not receive any benefits, even when they are employed on a full-time basis.

Krueger, a former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said he was surprised by the findings of his own study, noting that the loss of full-time work has hit every demographic. “Workers seeking full-time, steady work have lost,” he said.

Together with the growth of fabulous wealth for the upper echelons and the figures on rising income inequality, the Krueger-Katz study further punctures the hype of the outgoing Obama administration that it has organised an “economic recovery” benefiting the mass of ordinary workers and their families.

These trends are reflected internationally. A report released by the International Labour Organisation earlier this month found that wage growth worldwide has decelerated since 2012, falling from 2.5 percent to 1.7 percent. If China, where wage growth has been faster than elsewhere, is excluded, the growth in global wages drops from 1.6 percent to just 0.9 percent.

The ILO study also pointed to the rise of social inequality, noting that in Europe, the top 10 percent of employees take home 25.5 percent of total wages, while the bottom 50 percent get 29.1 percent.

This year has been characterised economically by a further increase in wealth and income for the top layers of society, continuing the trend since the global economic crisis. This redistribution of wealth and income from the bottom to the very top has been fuelled by the provision of trillions of dollars in ultra-cheap money to the banks and financial speculators.

Politically, it has been marked by a shift in the other direction, with the growth of social opposition.

This has taken the form of intensifying hostility to the entire official political establishment, reflected most notably in the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the US presidential election, not only in the support for Trump but more directly in the support for the self-proclaimed “socialist” Bernie Sanders.

At present, however, the political situation is marked by a profound contradiction. While the growth of social opposition is being driven by growing anti-capitalist sentiment, so far it has resulted in political gains for right-wing political forces, a contradiction that finds its sharpest expression internationally in the election of Trump and his installation of a cabinet of billionaires, military figures and ultra-right-wing and fascistic demagogues.

The responsibility for this situation rests

entirely with the official “left” parties and the

trade unions, which have functioned as the

chief enforcers for all the attacks on the

wages and social conditions of the working

class in the US and worldwide since the crisis

of 2008.

But while right-wing political tendencies have been the initial beneficiaries, the social crisis will intensify and assume ever more explosive forms, posing the necessity for the resolution of the present political impasse through the development of a mass socialist movement armed with a revolutionary perspective for the conquest of political power by the working class.